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The essence of religion is the knowledge of God which is eternal life. That and nothing less than that is religion. Everything else is on the surface, is superfluous save for the needs of men.

Annie Besant

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Annie Besant
Age: 86 †
Born: 1847
Born: January 1
Died: 1933
Died: January 1
Editor
Essayist
Feminist
Journalist
Member Of The London School Board
Orator
Politician
Suffragist
Theosophist
Writer
London
England
Annie Wood Besant
Annie Wood
Annie Besant
Men
Eternal
Life
Knowledge
Less
Religion
Else
Superfluous
Everything
Surface
Nothing
Save
Needs
Essence

More quotes by Annie Besant

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Never yet has a God been defined in terms which were not palpably self-contradictory and absurd never yet has a God been described so that a concept of Him was made possible to human thought.
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One of the great advantages of cremation - apart from all sanitary conditions - lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the material elements composing the physical and astral corpses, brought about by the burning.
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Strange indeed would it be if all the space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the inhabitants of Earth the only forms in which intelligence could clothe itself.
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No durable things are built on violent passion. Nature grows her plants in silence and in darkness, and only when they have become strong do they put their heads above the ground.
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The destruction of India's village system was the greatest of England's blunders.
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Premonitions, presentiments, the sensing of unseen presences and many allied experiences are due to the activity of the astral body and its reaction on the physical their ever-increasing frequency is merely the result of its evolution among educated people.
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The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity.
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This Old Testament - containing error, folly, absurdity and immorality - is by English statute law declared to be of divine authority, a blasphemy - if there were anyone to be blasphemed - blacker and more insolent than any word ever written or penned by the most hotheaded Freethinker.
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Celibacy is not natural to men or to women all bodily needs require their legitimate satisfaction, and celibacy is a disregard of natural law.
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It is the duty of the followers of Islam to spread through the civilised world, a knowledge of what Islam means - its spirit and message.
Annie Besant
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Man is ever searching for the source whence he has come, searching for the life which is upwelling within him, immortal, nay, eternal and divine and every religion is the answer from the Universal Spirit to the seeking spirits of men that came forth from Him.
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The world, with all its beauty, its happiness and suffering, its joys and pains, is planned with the utmost ingenuity, in order that the powers of the Self may be shown forth in manifestation.
Annie Besant
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Yoga is a science, and not a vague dreamy drifting or imagining.
Annie Besant
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No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism.
Annie Besant
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At the solemn moment of death, every man, even when death is sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled before him, in its minutest details. For one short instant the personal becomes one with the individual and all-knowing ego. But this instant is enough to show to him the whole chain of causes which have been at work during his life.
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We learn much during our sleep, and the knowledge thus gained slowly filters into the physical brain, and is occasionally impressed upon it as a vivid and illuminative dream.
Annie Besant
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The highest Hindu intellectual training was based on the practice of yoga, and produced, as its fruit, those marvellous philosophical systems, the six Darshanas and the Brahma Sutras, which are still the delight of scholars and the inspiration of occultists and mystics.
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A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.
Annie Besant
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The human body is constantly undergoing a process of decay and of reconstruction. First builded into the astral form in the womb of the mother, it is built up continually by the insetting of fresh materials. With every moment tiny molecules are passing away from it with every moment tiny molecules are streaming into it.
Annie Besant
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The soul grows by reincarnation in bodies provided by nature, more complex, more powerful, as the soul unfolds greater and greater faculties. And so the soul climbs upward into the light eternal. And there is no fear for any child of man, for inevitably he climbs towards God.
Annie Besant